THE UCONN MATHEMATICS CLUB

by Keith Conrad, faculty advisor

This spring, after a 10-year hiatus, the UConn Math Club was revived. [Web address:

http://www.math.uconn.edu/~kconrad/mathclub.] The officers of the Math Club were: President -Scott D'Alessandri; Vice-President-Chris Collin; Treasurer-Cheng Yu. The primary purpose of the club is to provide a forum for undergraduate students to hear about topics that are not met in the basic mathematics courses. Talks in the Math Club have generally attracted between 12 and 14 students a week, presumably not just because of the free pizza and soda! There were noticeably larger turnouts for the talks by our own Professors Wickless and McKenna.

Equally encouraging is that, just as research seminars within the department have outside speakers, so too did the Math Club. There were four talks by mathematicians not affiliated with UConn (see the schedule below), and the club hopes that USG funds will allow this trend to continue.

Meetings at the start of the semester were in a small room, but moved to the department's colloquium room to better accommodate the audience. When plans for an undergraduate lounge are realized, we hope that the Math Club can make regular use of the new room.

Schedule of Math Club talks for Spring 2004

Feb. 11 K. Conrad Relativistic Addition and Real Addition

Feb. 25 W. Wickless The Impossibility of Trisecting Angles

Mar. 3 D. Pollack (Wesleyan) An Introduction to Elliptic Curves

Mar. 17 A. Russell Coin-flipping Over the Phone: an Introduction

to Provably Secure Two Party Communication

Mar. 24 P.J. McKenna Why Suspension Bridges Sometimes Fall Down

Mar. 30 R. Kaufmann (OK State) An Introduction to Topology

Mar. 31 A. Rej The Geometry of Quaternions

Apr. 7 D.R. Solomon Orders of Infinity

Apr. 15 D. Khoshnevisan (U. Utah) Random Thoughts (In Two Acts)

Apr. 21 T. Weston (Amherst) The Banach--Tarski Paradox

Math club meeting on March 31st.